by Barnes Eric;
I see the gardener is sitting near the front. In a moment he stands up and takes a few steps up the altar so he can be seen.
“We need volunteers,” he says, his hand moving absently to his neck. He presses the nubs of his missing fingers across his jaw. “A schedule. Rules for what to do when someone thinks that there is trouble.”
There is discussion of this. Some people shake their heads. Other people nod. One man stands and says, “I want to be safe. But I don’t want to die.”
There is discussion of this. Heads shake. Others nod. But there’s no yelling and no anger. People mostly talk among themselves. No one responds directly to the gardener.
“I think what we know,” the gardener now says loudly, quieting the crowd, his hand slowly moving across the closely cut hair on his head, “is that to do this, to do it right, you have to understand your capacity for violence.” He pauses. “You have to be willing to stand on that overpass and talk to the driver of every car that wants to enter the North End. You have to be willing to tell some people that they cannot pass.” He pauses again. “And that means you have to be willing to enforce what you have said.”
There is discussion of this.
I make notes. I’ve made notes all along.
“But if you’re willing to enforce,” the gardener starts now, a few minutes later, already pausing and waiting for the rest of the people to go silent, “then hopefully you’ll never have to do it. Because it’s disorder that these people want, the expectation of coming here and finding chaos.”
“But it isn’t chaos here,” says a woman in the crowd.
The gardener nods. “That is what we have to show them,” he says. “Right now, there is no sign of the order that, in fact, we live with.” Again he pauses. No one speaks. He says, “A person on the overpass, a person very clearly willing to enforce order on anyone he or she encounters, I think we have to believe that will be enough.”
A schedule is made. Volunteers stand in four separate lines. Sign their names on pieces of paper when they get to the front. They pick a time. Four-hour shifts, we decide. Four people at a time, standing guard at the overpass. Other volunteers will build a gate. Scavengers will position concrete barriers to slow cars down as they approach. Other volunteers will simply bring food and coffee to the guards.
As people stand in line in the church, ready to sign up, eventually I find the gardener near me. We’re up against the west wall, on the dark side of the church. I’m still writing in my notebook.
He glances at me. “That was unexpected,” he says.
I shake my head, slightly, not sure which part he means.
“Me,” he says. “Talking to the crowd. I’m a botanist,” he says, looking out at the crowd of people. “A gardener.”
It takes me a moment to respond. “Did you ever teach?” I ask.
He nods. Says, “I suppose it’s similar.”
“Have you ever been in charge?” I ask.
He says, “Only students. Grad students. Research trips into the mountains. Searching for rare plant species in the Himalayas.” He smiles slightly. “All quite different than this.”
I think about what the commissioner said. That everyone knows my story. I realize the gardener knows. Of course he does. I know who you are, he said when I first met him. Everyone does.
I look around the room. These people, they know who I am.
I turn to my notes. It’s hard to read my writing on this side of the church, with the lights out above me, and I think to myself I should have taken notes from the bright side of the sanctuary. “Everything,” I say to the gardener, turning to him, “everything is different than this.”
• • •
I stare at the high ceiling. The atrium in the library.
There are copies of the newspaper articles here, I realize. Articles about the deaths of four children and their mother. Transcripts, maybe even video, of the TV news reports.
The same stories the commissioner has seen. That, she says, everyone knows about.
Stories like that, they are widely read. Watched over and again. I know this. I always have.
I just don’t think about it.
• • •
“Why did you think to take over the overpass?” the minister asks me.
We sit in my garden. He drinks and I do not.
“I woke up,” I say. “And thought about the last time I hit one of those kids. And about the time you did. And the gardener. And I realized that moments like that could only lead to more attacks. Not just by them. But by us.”
He sips. Rain dusts us lightly in a thin coat of mist or dew.
He says, “There’s something about it that becomes appealing. The violence. Hitting someone. It’s not the hurting. It’s the power. The control you think you have.”
I think for a minute about this. “Yes,” I say.
“And a sense,” he says, “that you will only push it further.”
• • •
I make my way through the first floor of a building across the street from the paper. A three-story building, brick, some hundred years old. I’ve never been inside it.
I’m waiting for the paper to finish printing. With its account of the plans to take over the overpass. And I want, for the first time, to see how people will respond.
There are desks lined up in four perfect rows, green desks, forty of them, with a large typewriter on each.
The linoleum floor is covered in a very fine dust. Gray, almost black dust, and I look behind me and see my footsteps. The footprints of a long-ago explorer. The footprints of the first man on the moon.
It is so still here.
A calendar, on one of the desks near me, reads February 1968.
This building, this office I walk through, it was closed many decades before the North End was abandoned.
Foreshadowing, had anyone cared to notice, of the desolation that would come.
• • •
Within a few days we have established a regular rotation at the overpass. The scavengers have installed concrete barriers and two heavy steel bars to act as a gate. Brokers and known faces are waved through. Others are told to stop and answer questions. There are only a few every day.
But four guards are at the overpass all day and all night. Men and women, different ages. Scavengers bring a tent with walls, the guards create a fire pit. Other scavengers build a small, open guard house with a bench and windows.
Only a handful of kids looking for trouble come all the way to the guardhouse. They pull up. They ask to be let through the gate. The guards ask them why they want to cross. The kids are sarcastic, belligerent, sometimes threatening.
The guards just stand and listen, then they walk away. The gate stays closed. The kids scream insults, honk their horns, throw bottles from their car toward the gate.
Eventually, though, the kids back up. And pull away.
But most of the kids don’t even approach the guards. They stop half a block away, watching the guards and fire pit and the gate and barriers. And then they move on.
They are not interested in the North End any more than they are the south. All they want is trouble. Wherever they can most easily find it.
• • •
The commissioners are furious that we’ve taken control of the overpass. They say they’ll send police to arrest the guards. They say they’ll send bulldozers to tear down the gate and barriers. One very old commissioner says he’ll have us sued, all of us, each one of us, he will have us sued.
The gardener, not far from me, I see him smiling some, as the old commissioner lists off the basis for his lawsuit.
But otherwise everyone in the audience, the hundred and fifty people from the North End, they all sit quietly. Staring back at the commissioners.
All of the commissioners had to pass through the gate, first speaking to the guards, explaining who they are and why they needed to cross into the North End.
“I don’t even want to be here!” one of the co
mmissioners is now saying from the table, staring out at the crowd that’s come to listen. “And now you are going to make me justify my being here? Who the hell do you people think you are?”
We all stare.
“None of this would be happening,” he says, looking at the other commissioners now, many of whom begin to nod, agreeing, “if we had simply forced these people to move away.”
Once more, I am angry. Picturing the woman and her boy. Thinking about her story. Of being forced from their home.
The commissioner has not spoken through all this. Finally, though, after twenty minutes of angry threats and accusations, she leans forward to say something. “The North End has never been a dangerous place. But it changed months ago. The same kids and the same gangs who wreak havoc in the south, they are coming over here, causing trouble. And we, this commission, did nothing to stop that. Nothing to help these people here. As you know, when it comes to this sort of trouble, we can’t even help ourselves.”
I want to yell.
Commissioners shake their heads, throw up their hands.
I want to scream.
She says, “So these people here did something to protect themselves. Why shouldn’t they? Why wouldn’t they? Wouldn’t each of you have done the same?”
Still I want to scream.
• • •
I’m at the overpass the next day, taking pictures for the paper, when the two police officers arrive. The two who’ve been here a few times before.
Cars and trucks, an almost overwhelming flow of traffic, race underneath us. The highway is eight lanes wide here, the traffic moving incredibly fast, as if the travelers beneath us are fleeing a flood or a war, and the sound of it leaves me slightly short of breath, the noise seeming still to always rise without ever reaching a peak.
The police officers are talking to the guards. Their car is parked to the side of the overpass. The guards have already opened the gate but the police seem uninterested in the gate or the barriers. If anything, the police officers seem to be laughing.
“Do you know how many of those commissioners live behind gated walls?” one of the police officers says to a guard, yelling to be heard over the sound of the traffic below us.
The guard is a scavenger, weathered and pale and thin, and yet, as big as each of the officers is, it’s hard not to think this woman could easily knock down either of them.
She is smiling some as the officers laugh. Her many earrings flash in the light. They don’t match, left side and right, but they aren’t meant to and I can see that some of them are made of copper wire and some are tiny nails.
“Gated communities,” the female officer yells, “with security guards and bars on their windows and alarm systems that go off every time one of their kids sneaks out at night to smoke some pot.”
“I’m sure they do,” the scavenger says and although she must be yelling to be heard, she doesn’t seem to strain.
One of the officers says, “Will you stop everyone who tries to pass?”
“We are not vigilantes,” the scavenger says. The woman. “We aren’t looking for retribution.”
The male officer nods. “Understand, though,” he yells to her, “that some of those commissioners are.”
The officers shake hands with the guards. The male officer waves toward me. “The writer,” he yells. “Someone told me who you are. You’re everywhere.”
I’m not sure what to say. In a moment, I simply raise my hand.
I realize the minister is next to me. He is pulling a red wagon carrying food and water for the guards. He says, leaning close to me so I can hear him, “I forgot to tell you that those police came by. To the church. To talk to me about that body you found.”
We watch the police car turn around, drive away into the South End.
The minister is still leaning close, yelling to me over the sounds of the traffic, “The cops made some noise about how I shouldn’t have handled the body at all, how that was illegal.” He smiles some, his small teeth showing. “One of them said I could lose my license. I asked him, ‘To be a minister or a mortician?’ Both of them tried not to laugh.”
My head nods. I think maybe I have smiled. But it’s hard to focus on the minister or the guards or even what those police officers were saying. I don’t like being at the overpass. It is a block long, but even from the north side, you can see the South End. There are low buildings and there’s a dingy gas station and there are trees.
Dead trees.
There is trash along the sidewalk too, and in the gutters in the street there are plastic bags that rattle in the wind, beer bottles, beer cans, a large paper bag from a fast food restaurant, all spread across the street, all having been thrown from passing cars.
There is very little trash in the North End.
I know that I should go to the south side of the overpass to take a photo of the gate and guardhouse and guards. The view that a visitor will see. But I can’t do it. I can’t get that close to the South End.
The minister is still standing near me.
In a moment, I say, “I need to take a picture from the other side.” I’m standing still as I say this. Staring toward the South End.
It’s a long minute. Maybe two. Cars scream out sometimes, a single engine roaring upward in high-pitched acceleration and how one noise could be louder than the others makes no sense to me.
I still have not stepped forward.
It’s as if the noise of the traffic were a harbinger of something we all know will happen. A warning, maybe, that if I cross I won’t ever be allowed back into the North End.
There’s a hand on my arm. The minister holds my elbow, very lightly. “I’d like to see the guardhouse from that side too,” he says.
He moves forward, still holding my elbow, and although we are walking side-by-side and he is hardly touching me, I am very much being pulled.
We cross through the gate and the concrete barriers meant to slow the traffic, the South End approaching me, it seems, and I can barely see beyond the low buildings and dark gas station right in front of me. Can barely see the tops of trees a few blocks away, thin and gray like the buildings beyond them and there are a million people there, so many people.
“Probably far enough,” the minister yells, but in the sound of the traffic here it’s like he’s whispering and I turn to him and he’s only barely smiling and I follow his arm on mine as he turns around and she was right, the commissioner, everyone does know my story, the minister does and the police do too and maybe the scavengers know it and maybe everyone I see on the street every day, maybe they all know the story of the family of six in the North End, five of whom died, their house burning down, the children and wife burned in their sleep as the dying city around them failed to respond.
But mostly I just try to step one more time.
“Take your picture,” the minister says, still a whisper. “Go ahead. Take it now.”
I turn around. Focus the camera. Take a picture. Focus again. Take another.
I see the North End beyond the gates. The lightly sloping neighborhoods and wide avenues leading toward downtown, the tops of buildings there, my building, my hotel and my room, it is one of them. I think, I can see the windows, very far away.
“That’s probably enough,” he whispers. Many minutes later.
The guards, the scavenger, they watch me. Very still. The scavenger, she has that stare.
And I turn to the minister. He’s shorter than me, but compact and strong, and if I fell he could hold me up. I can’t move. But he steps forward again, back to the North End, and I can barely see him, eyes so blurry now and wet, but the minister still is smiling his slight smile, arm on mine.
“Now another step,” he whispers. “And now another step.”
• • •
The South End is the suburbs to the North End. The sprawling, senseless suburbs that will also someday be abandoned. You can’t build places of substance and duration only as an antidote to what you have
for so long neglected.
I write this up for the paper.
In my memory, the South End is made of plastic. An amorphous mass of tan houses with flat and treeless yards, of low shopping centers with stores placed intermittently in plain boxes of one size. There is no height in the South End, the trees too young to be noticed, the buildings all kept to a few stories at most. And the surfaces of everything are like plastic, the neighborhoods finished along sharp lines and dull curves that are repeated, again and again, on every house, every block, every subdivision for many miles. Some neighborhoods are fading, not aging, that panacea of newness already crumbling as cracks show in the sidewalks and as potholes form in the side streets and as the surfaces of the homes and shopping centers all begin to peel, like the decal of a window on a small toy house, the decal lifting at the edges, sliding along the surface of that toy, now off center and askew.
I write this all up for the paper.
When I lived in the South End for that year after they died, I remember that I seemed always to be driving. I drove constantly along streets of six or eight lanes, stop lights, turn lanes, the exhaust of delivery trucks idling in traffic in front of me. To do the simplest thing, I drove, in traffic, waiting at traffic lights turned green, waiting for cars to complete their turn, waiting for trucks to enter the lane.
I think about the story of the woman and her boy. How that story makes me want to scream.
The people of the South End aren’t aware that their own community is dying too, that their existence is colorless and indistinct, filled with tasks like navigating traffic and making money to pay for bigger plastic homes farther from the crowded neighborhoods they already want to leave behind as they keep pushing to build new places even farther to the south, always shutting down their own failed neighborhoods and driving good people away.
I write this up, read it again, and put it all in the paper.
I think about what the woman told me.
I think about wanting to scream.
The South End is based on fear, fear of anything that is not new, fear of the North End they want to forget, and fear of the death of their own neighborhoods, a death which, right now, spreads steadily among everyone who lives there.